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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Reality of Real Change

This isn't really a new topic, but one I feel I must rehash upon as it's been some time since I covered it. I've noticed several comments in response on Twitter to my previous post. Occupy Calgary said "It doesn't say what we should do though!". You're right, it doesn't.

There is a reason it doesn't, and that reason as I've mentioned time and time again on this blog is that "who am I to tell you what to do about a given problem?". This differs greatly from pointing out that a strategy currently in use has failed. Call it "constructive criticism".

This expectation of a post which describes a problem always having to offer a solution is quite common in our society. Usually in a post formatted in this way the solution offered is half-baked and shallow with an "everyone lived happily ever after" ending. That's not what I offer here, everyone isn't going to be living happily ever-after, the problems we face are deep and systemic and require open, transparent discussion to even begin formulating a plan to address them. We need to be honest about the situation, and what's possible. It's not that there are not solutions, it's that the required solutions are going to represent a very different way of life. I recently wrote:

If the problem we're trying to solve is "how do we make things like they were before 2008?" - there is no
solution. That era of growth was largely based on fraud, it's never
coming back. We can either look forward and seriously decide what sort
of system we do want, or we can claw on to the revisionist history of
returns seemingly coming out of thin air. They were, so what are we
going to do about it?

The one thing I can tell you though, Canadians, is we're going to need a lot more courage to do whatever it is we eventually decide to do. I don't know what the actual solution is, and nobody who is honest does either. What's important though is we acknowledge how dire the situation actually is, how far down the rabbit hole we are. Understanding our position in the situation will help us decide where our time is best spent. Is our time best spent fighting FIPA with an email campaign we all know will be ignored? One of the sad truths is, the longer we wait to retake our national sovereignty, the harder it's going to be. Things never should have been allowed to go as far as they already have, but now that they have Canadians must understand that we don't have all the time in the world. Most of our sovereignty has already been taken from us and as a result any attempt to fix it is going to be very painful. We waited too long. Email campaigns might have worked, back when we still had some form of a democracy, but not today. We must accept that it's been hijacked by a global governance cartel.

Canadians must be willing to step out of their comfortable lifestyles before they are pulled out of them by force. This starts (as that scene in the network describes) by getting mad:

I'm not talking about "I'm going to send an angry letter" mad, I'm talking about "I've had enough of this shit!" mad. You've got to say "I'm a human being damn it! My life has value!". You getting me? You've got to take risks. Look around the world, in almost every other country.. the people are mad! Riots in China. All around the world, people are getting mad and are expressing it. Sometimes in good ways, some times in bad ways, but I can tell you this - nobody in China is writing automated emails to their government, they already know nobody is listening. Nobody in Greece is writing letters to their government, because they all know nobody is listening. Nobody is listening, folks!

The real key to change, is to change our world-view about what a solution entails. To change our world-view about who is capable of doing it. The people in power? No. You, me, your dog - we're capable, but it's going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of risk. You can not oppose the system from the safety that system offers. You need to take the lead, no one else is going to do it for you. We're all leaders, it's the belief someone else has to approve or O.K. our ideas which holds us back. As the old saying goes, "when the student is ready, the teacher appears".

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Richard Fantin is a self-taught software developer who has mostly throughout his career focused on financial applications and high frequency trading. He currently works for eQube gaming systems.

Nazayh Zanidean is a Project Coordinator for a mid-sized construction contractor in Calgary, Alberta. He enjoys writing as a hobby on topics that include foreign policy, international human rights, security and systemic media bias.